Thursday, November 17, 2011

We've been torturing ourselves by watching back-to-back episodes of No Reservations for the last few days, with the occasional Andrew Zimmern outing in between.

Most recently we watched as Bourdain floated up the Amazon in search of "the last frontier of modern gastronomy" increasingly aware that the idea for this trek might well have been a bit of a practical joke conceived by Ferran Adrià and his mates. In an obvious perma-filth from pain in his lower back, he did rather pointedly encounter a cluster of wild geese at the end of this Herzogian quest. ("Canadian ducks" observed his guide.)

Bourdain had spent most of his time at Adrià's fabled three-star eatery in a fanboi daze. At the end of the meal José Andrés was red in the face and blubbering, but by then they'd consumed a number of solid state cocktails, wine, champagne and some gin and tonics, the latter surprisingly standard-looking in their preparation. The best moment of this paean to El Bulli occurred when a little plate of baby octopuses was placed in front of the intrepid chef and he announced a need to take a picture of it "so I can look at it later and touch myself".

His long overdue trip to the Philippines turned into an extended disquisition on why these islands and their gastronomic treats are not more well known on the international scene. I've never been (too complex from a cartographic point of view?) but I did try a delicious Adobo in Costa Rica last year, at San José's commendable Tin Jo. I have to say I do like the idea of these dampas that Tony visited in Manila; part market, part open-plan restaurants, where you buy the ingredients for a meal over on one side, and then watch as they are fried up in front of you on the other.

Colombian grub appears to be no great shakes meanwhile. Think of the stuff on the typical Guatemalan menu with the largest quantity of saturated fat...and add more grease. Even on the coast, where you's think you can hardly go wrong with lobster and red snapper etc., there's an awful lot of deep frying going on. That said, Bourdain did get led up to one little culinary Xanadu in the hills above Medellín called Quearepaenamorarte, where the resident chef concocted a dreamy little cornless tamal, filled with fish and shrimp embedded in a masa made from plantain, milk and coconut.

Bourdain's exploration of Cuban restaurant food was not altogether encouraging either. OK, it's not going to be like the USSR in the eighties, but some ingredients are scarce and the food culture seems to be as rigid and conservative as it (mostly) is here in Guatemala. The biggest issue is one of mood and morals however. As Bourdain put it: either you are subsidising the locals' dining via the semi-private paladares or you are gorging yourself in state-run restaurants which very few Cubans could ever afford.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention the excellent Dubai episode, which was a superb exercise in presenting the viewer with the opportunity to read between the lines.

Over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to note that there's hardly anything creepier on this planet than the wealthy, Western-educated Arab. Beyond a condescending manner, many are self-involved and seem to have some nasty atavistic switch at the back of their inner selves. But as well as unearthing some fine examples of the type, Bourdain located and dined with an even slimier individual, a British banker patsy, duly coaxed into making grotesquely amoral statements about the virtual slavery which has underpinned Dubai's growth. He only had to set him up with a few carefully couched questions and off he went. Jeremy Paxman should have a go some time.

Much of the early section was led by a more sympathetic Indian finance bod who'd clearly signed up to a rather distasteful Faustian pact, but was making the most of it. Then there was time for deliberately mixed messages about Ski Dubai."There's an aesthetic sensibility going on here," Tony conceded (as Milton might have noted of Satan's Pandemonium in Paradise Lost), having just observed that the venture must be the most eco-hostile in a city already dishing out an on-going environmental disaster.

There was irony to prised out of another scene in which Bourdain visited the owner of a stable of racing camels who informed him somewhat pompously that 'our race' could not have survived without these animals. Bourdain, taking race in this context to mean human race, duly lectured him on the role of the international trade routes to the Italian Rennaissance, while the Arab, for whom it obviously meant 'Arab', looked on with a blank, me pela expression.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Angela's the kind of square, frumpy girl at college who only throws parties to appear cool as well as rich. And to rub shoulders with local lothario Silvio — a self-styled adorable reprobate who likes to think he wouldn't be seen dead with her in any other context.

Her money and connections have permitted her to hook up with a suave yet stunted other-half called Nick. He gives the impression that he's the one with both the trousers and the wallet in their relationship, but in fact he's neither. He's maxed out all his cards and he hasn't told her he had a rather worrying financial misunderstanding with the folks back home last week.

George and his mates got on the invitation list by telling a load of tall tales about how ludicrously loaded they are. Shipping and all that. Then they showed up empty handed, made a B-line for the drinks table, grabbed anything unopened, and have since been getting generally rowdy over in a corner.

Ideally they'd like to vacate somewhere else to hold their own little after party, but George's attempt to put it to a vote ended in a fracas. Now the booze has run dry, George has passed out and Angela has her beady eyes on their group from across the room.

Yes, she's on to them, and wants them to leave and never come back, but is frightened of making a scene which would kill the whole party stone dead.

And what a mess they've made. She's crying on Nick's shoulder as she takes in all the splintered furniture and the vomit on the couch. Surely they can't expect her to pay for all this?

Meanwhile, Silvio has decided that his style was being cramped and has left the building.

The remaining members of his overgroomed 'Club Med' clique are standing around in a huddle looking a bit confused. Is the party over yet? They can see why Angela has gone a bit ape about all the puke and stuff, but Silvio has been paying for most of the alcohol since Angela's party scene started...even if it did kind of fall off the back of a lorry.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

"We English rely almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own, which more logical nations find difficult to master "

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Danny Gabay and Yiannis Koutelidakis, a pair from Fathom Consulting, passed the Guardian a note this week which couched its observations on Italy's insolvency within a rather clever metaphor of literary provenance:

"Italy is more akin to a once rich and famous Count who has been using the family heirlooms for firewood for years now and is facing some pretty cold winters ahead."

And, rather like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa back in the day, this count has been shivering away in his ancestral pad for many years now. For monetary union did no favours to the Eurozone's third largest economy, which was growing at a slow pace of 1% even in the 'boom' years before the 2008 crisis, and suffered a 5% plunge after it, comparatively more severe than the slide elsewhere in the EU. And relative to the Germans, the Italians have experienced a greater loss of competitiveness than the Greeks since joining the €.

Daniel Gros (Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies), has analysed all the factors that normally foster an increase in economic activity and has found that in all but one case, these have improved in Italy since it adopted the euro. The odd one out? Governance.

If political failure can so easily trump the potential for economic success, it is the very collection of individuals today voting for the new austerity package who pose the greatest threat to the future of European integration. For with a debt to GDP ratio of 120%, an Italy which doesn't grow at faster rate than 1% over the next few years represents a permanent systemic threat.

In much the same way that the stench of corruption and a trail of floozies couldn't bring down Silvio Berlusconi, but the collective agitation of the bond market could, the spectre of international terrorism turns out to be a less effective tool for dismantling democracy than that of major financial disorder.

That the plutocrats fear poverty as much as death (and certainly more than the deaths of their fellow citizens somewhere lower down the scale) is something that eventually occurred to the IRA in the latter stages of their campaign when they switched from targeting random civilians and the occasional politician, to attempting to raze large parts of London's financial districts to the ground.

So we can slot financial crisis somewhere in between nuclear meltdown and army of suicide bombers on the scale of international fear catalysts. And we can see from the repeated use of the word 'contagion' over the past few months that this particular panic considers itself almost equivalent in overall scariness to a global pandemic of the biological sort.

We can also understand why those in a position to define public information have been so keen on the notion of the dirty bomb, which combines the unmatchable horror of seeping radioactivity with the similarly unseen threat of the enemy within. Then all one has to do is suggest that Wall Street would be high on the list of potential targets for such a device...

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Watching Greece change its PM has become a spectacle akin to watching Yahoo! appointing a new CEO...something that won't have gone unnoticed amongst those who still consider themselves the Greek electorate.

Yesterday, while the Greek political elite struggled to find a functionary who was dull and compromised enough to suit all their interests, Italian bond yields poked their noses above 7.5%, perilously close to that all important 8%, goodbye Italy and goodbye Eurozone as we know it, cut-off point. The financial talking heads all say that what the markets want right now is certainty, but what yesterday's stampede for the exits demonstrates is that they don't really want to face up to the certainty that Europe is about to go down the plughole.

Anyway, things appear to have settled a bit today. Italy's 10-year bond yields dipped below 7% again and Spain's are not that far behind at 5.75%. As we can see from the chart below, it's difficult to see how a default in Spain would not be triggered by a worsening of the crisis in Greece and Italy. The latter nation owes €1.4 trillion, so the sucker is basically unbailoutable, however generous/stupid the Chinese happen to be feeling at the time.

For those who comfort themselves that the problem will go away once the northern members of the Eurozone have divested themselves of all those Club Med deadbeats, take a look at French 10-year bond yields today: 3.45% and rising. Merkozy may be joined at the hip, but the gap between the cost of state borrowing in France and Germany hasn't been this wide since '92 and it seems almost certain now that France will struggle to keep its own AAA rating, the loss of which will trigger another selling spree.

Dr Johnson famously said of the Giant Causeway, that while it was worth seeing, it probably wasn't worth going to see. I think that in the end I felt something similar about Machu Picchu and my journey to it. Stevenson had also observed that tourism is the art of disappointment, and while there was nothing the least bit disappointing about my experience of being in Machu Picchu, it's hard not to reflect back on the getting there as a trail of not quite satifying experiences.

I suppose this may be because I undertook that journey in August at the rather late-in-the-day suggestion of V, who had suddenly blurted out that I ought to go and see Machu Picchu. Thus, the going to Peru and the being in Peru presented themselves as collateral concerns.

The biggest psychological hurdle turned out to be my arrival and departure point; Lima.

Since the last cholera epidemic it has acquired something of a reputation as a trendy gastronomic destination, but no amount of yummy food can compensate for the relentlessly doom-laden aspect of the Peruvian capital.

It's a desert city perched on a bluff above the kind of sea that makes you want to make a B-line for the high ground. And when I say desert, I don't mean some eye-catching variation on aridity, the likes of which one comes across in parts of Central Mexico. Here the outlying terrain looks like the rest of the planet will when we've finally finished murdering it.

As for the cloying coastal fog —lagarúa— it prompted Melville to describe Lima as "the saddest, strangest city thou can'st see" and native writers such as Vargas Llosa and others have since described the prevailing ambience as leaden, ashen, cold and tenacious, "a floating powder" (Salazar Bondy) and like being inside "the belly of a dead whale" (Alfredo Bryce Echenique).

Why are Central America's problem-laden capitals less dismaying? I think it's because they're in the tropics. There's hardly a grisly indoor domestic space in the world which cannot be improved by the judicious deployment of a pot plant or two, and so it is with our own concrete jungles here: that they often seem on the verge of being reclaimed by the real thing can only really be totted up on the merit side.

It's fitting that the most diverting site I came across in Lima was the Convento de San Francico (pic below) with its underground bone dump. These catacombs became the final resting ground for 25,000 Limeños up until 1851, when the practice of mass burials beneath major churches was deemed insalubrious. Upstairs, theformermonastery's library, with its 25,000 crumbly tomes, would make the perfect setting for a thought piece on the death of the book.

Cuzco was lovely, but I was out of breath even in my sleep.

Arequipa was also pleasant enough, but not as deeply interesting as nearer equivalents such as Oaxaca. With its three looming volcanoes it presented itself as an odd amalgam of places already digested, Antigua itself, Mexico's various 'colonial gems' and even Tapachula. It wasn't until the third day that it started to reveal its underlying selfhood, and by then I'd seen nearly all I wanted to see and could think of little else to do other than sit around and drink coffee.

Across this land, the juxtaposition of the strikingly familiar and the strikingly strange was always to be a tad disconcerting.

For the trip to Havana I shall be back on COPA — in part because I would rather collect their miles than TACA's, and in part because the cheapness and shortness of the flight from Cancún was offset by the cost and hassle of getting up there. I also had no desire to reacquaint myself with Soviet-built airliners.

Still, Guatemala to La Habana via Panama City is hardly the most carbon-conscious route. I was tempted to take advantage once again of COPA's ongoing invitation to its passengers to indulge in a night or two in the Panamanian capital at no extra charge, but decided against it as I want to get stuck in to Cuba as quickly as possible.

I wonder what kind of fellow travellers I will encounter there. Well, as I will be sauntering towards to my nephew's wedding on the beach at Guardalavaca ('Keep the Cow') at some point I'm going to have to scrub up for an encounter with a chunk of my own family.

One supposes that, across the island, there will be fewer Yanks, more Canucks, and, horror of horrors, a load of Brits. They were thick on the ground in Peru too, where one comes across more of the socks and sandals sort of traveller than one does here in Guatemala. But it was August, so the Frogs outnumbered them all.

One of the real downsides to being a tourist in Peru is that the relevant authorities seem to want to make it the most regimented experience possible. When I came across a museum in Cuzco where photography was actually permitted and I didn't have to spend fifteen minutes talking myself out of the company of a fetching female student guide, I was frankly flaberghasted. I very much doubt whether the average sightseer has to jump through quite so many hoops in communist Cuba as one does in Peru.

Perhaps the aforementioned French tour parties have to share some of the blame on the demand side. For Peru seems to attract a lot of visitors who are not what you would tend to regard as natural travellers (or even tourists for that matter.) Specifically middle-aged French couples who one suspects have rarely partaken of a vacance outside their own borders, and seem to be on the verge of some sort of unseemly outburst at any given moment. They certainly seem to look as if they might need regimenting, and may even crave it.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

With the PMs of both Greece and Italy circling the drain, and both nations attempting to demonstrate that their preferred response to outside interference would be the no government approach, it wasn't going to be long before the financial markets wised up to the fact that this was not a particularly positive news story.

On a separate note, us gibberish speakers in Latino-land are all Greeks. For Gringo apparently derives from Griego, the favourite term of abuse in eighteenth century Málaga for anyone who spoke Spanish badly. (In Madrid this agravio was reserved for the Irish.)

We export two chief kinds of Englishmen, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit: To fit themselves modestly into the picture and suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge people among whom they live into strange unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.

The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their impassivity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the people among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an example of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Misha Glenny, an acknowledged expert on Russia's 'crime of the century', when state assets were sold off at ganga prices to salivating, semi-criminal, would-be oligarchs, now believes the same thing is about to happen in Greece.

Writing in the FT about the moves made by Greece's high-earning, tax-evading, super-rich, he notes the surge in Greek interest this year in London's property market, and adds that these groups have an even bigger eye on the assets that the government may soon be forced to sell off...

"The oligarch conglomerates are waiting to scoop them up at anything up to less than a fifth of their real value – a poor financial return for the state but in 5-10 years time a bonanza for the purchasers. Some have been even banking on Greece exiting the euro so that they can then use the billions of euros squirrelled away outside the country to purchase the assets for knock-down drachma prices... If the crises in Greece and Italy tell us anything, it is that the European Union has tolerated widespread corruption, criminality and malign governance not just in supplicants from eastern Europe but in some of its core western European members....If anything is to come from the catastrophe facing Europe it is essential these patterns of corruption are broken. Otherwise neither Greece nor Italy will ever be free of the institutional sclerosis that allows these practices to prosper."

Monday, November 07, 2011

Aware that I have had neither the time nor the inclination to review on this blog all the movies we've watched this year, here's how the scoring has gone at least, up to November 5. October was a good month. This one has started off less encouragingly...

Can't decide whether to risk sending this month's average to dangerously low levels by watching Miranda July's The Future. Will I want to chew my own nuts off or will I be charmed by the ickle kitty?

Sunday, November 06, 2011

It seems that the train journey I had planned to take from Havana to Santa Clara is not to be. It was one of only two reasons I could muster for making the journey, the other being a visit to the mausoleum of el comandante, but it seems that El Che doesn't open for business on Mondays.

My itineraries are usually distinguished by their flexibility, but over in Cuba they like to see a firm committment to location for at least the first three days and so, after booking my flight and making reservations for the three evenings that I plan to spend in the capital, Monday it was really going to have to be unless I was prepared to sacrifice one of my stops en route to the east of the island.

Sadly the evening rattler to Santa Clara is said to be the only reliable train service these days in Cuba, a society which once proudly boasted the first railway system in all of Latin America. It will have to wait for another day, and I will have to depend on the buses of Viazul to get around.

If any of the train journeys I made between Reading and London Paddington last April were at all memorable, I'm sure I'd remember at least one of them. I do however recall having to traverse the Thames valley that way four times in forty-eight hours around the time of the Royal Wedding.

So this year's only unforgetable ride on the rails was the return leg from Machu Picchu (Aguas Calientes) to Ollantaytambo on IncaRail. On the way out I'd been packed in knee-to-knee with the French tourists, but on the return leg the only seat avaialble was in First Class, where I was to share a delightfully robed table with a well-to-do Peruvian mother and her somewhat high-maintenance, coppertopped ten-year-old. The meal was served in little ceramic pots: there was a tomato confit and quinoa salad, queso paria, a veggie lasagne, and sacred valley fruit infused with mint for dessert. The wine was local, a Tacama Gran Tinto from the oasis of Ica (south of Lima), and appeared first in a steaming mulled form — one might say the last hike of the day, and very welcome as the cold closes in at 3300m.

First Great Western commuter services aside, I can readily agree with Paul Theroux's notion that, alone of all forms of transportation, a train is just as much a place as a vehicle. Of course the most famous train in Santa Clara is indeed now a place (of pilgrimage), as it was famously derailed by el Che himself at the wheel of a bulldozer as it attempted to deliver government reinforcements to the critical final battle raging in that city. (Viz Stephen Soderbergh's Che Part 1)

If I hadn't sat through 2/3 of Aqui Me Quedo, I would have no hesitation in describing Sleeping Beauty as the worst movie I've seen so far this year. And relative to budget and intellectual aspirations it almost certainly is.

Before I really get stuck in however, let's just cast our minds back to the source material such asHouse of The Sleeping Beauties by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata. From a nation that has staked a realistic claim to being the mecca of all things outrageously pervy, there's perhaps a surprisingly elegaic subtlety to his esoteric tale of lost potency. It has twice inspired Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez to explore similar scenarios, most notably in his last novel Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes, but also in the short story in which he locates himself next to a beautiful sleeping girl on a long haul flight. (The debt to Kawabata is directly acknowledged when Gabo remarks that House of Sleeping Beauties is his chosen reading material for the journey.)

Non-Nobel Prize winning author and first time film director Julia Leigh obviously thought it would be illuminating to view this conceit from the sleeper's perspective. Its origins are acknowledged obliquely via a load of bonsai trees in the background and other Japanese interior touches, yet it is movies like Kubrick's last masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut and the guilty pleasure that is Hostel, that more openly spring to mind as influences.

The result is some sort of boorish Australian pastiche of European art house cinema from the mid part of the last century. Leigh appears to have scripted her characters so that they act just short of what we would expect of human beings made of flesh and blood. All the excrutiating underlying emotional currents present in the novella have been purged, because for this director the concept and its ramifications are far more important than the individuals encapsulated by it. During the scene in which one of the old geezers delivers a po-faced monologue about a short story by Julio Cortázar before climbing into bed with 'Sara', the fourth wall broke down, and so did we, into fits of hysterics. Who needs soporific drugs when you have these guys around?

Now Eyes Wide Shut also divided critics, attracted accusation of art porn, and is not without its flaws (most notably Kidman and Cruise). But other than the changes in time and location, Kubrick was far more faithful to Schnitzler's vision than he was to say Stephen King's in The Shining. Might one suggest that this was because Kubrick knew himself to be a superior artist to King, but perhaps not to Schnitzler?

Anyway, my own view on this matter would be that whilst it is perfectly OK to add flesh-eating zombies to Jane Austen classics, it would not be a recommended career move for any budding female author to re-write the works of Hemingway as a critique of masculine power relations. In short, if there's any chance that an author might have been better than you are, resist the temptation to steal his or her basic idea and rejig it to suit your own concerns.

There's really nothing more unedifying to behold in art than mediocrity affecting a painstaking pose of profundity.

Let's pause to calibrate our sense of doom and gloom by checking out some of the latest thinking from the pessimist platoon's point man. It seems that Dr Death likes to invite people back to his pad for wine, canapés and talk of creeping cataclysm.

It's a funny old thing this 'slow motion train wreck'. It looks a bit more to me like a set of nested train wrecks all playing out at slightly different frame rates. Indeed, some of them are periodically on freeze frame, almost tempting one to imagine that they might stay that way for long enough for most of the passengers to exit unharmed, or somehow even snap into reverse.

Greek politics seem resistant to all efforts at containment. If the Greeks themselves should have been offered the chance to vote on their own rescue package, then there are surely quite a few non-Greeks who probably feel they should have had in on the Papandreou confidence vote. The Greek PM managed to survive that process, albeit with a large knife in the back courtesy of his Finance Minister, but his plan of forming a coalition government of 'national unity' looks unpromising this weekend, given the continuing absence of the main opposition party.

Yet perhaps the more intriguing train wreck right now is Italy. The Euro denominated BTP/bund spread separating Italy from Germany is at a record high. The Italian Central Bank claims that Italy is solvent so long as it doesn't have to pay more than 8%. We're at 6.6% and counting. Last week, at a joint press conference, when Merkozy was asked if Berlusconi had been able to reassure them, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Meanwhile, the Italian PM has been bragging that Italy turned down the option of a low interest loan from the IMF.

Friday, November 04, 2011

Given the way Perras had been shamelessly plugged across the more shameless comedy shows on Telehit, we had both been expecting this festival reject to be both amateurish and trashy, but it turned out to be a more substantial work than either of us had anticipated. (We might have guessed this had we then known that it began life as a work for the stage scripted by debut director Guillermo Ríos.)

Yet in truth, these kind of fourteen-year-olds do exist in some quantity down here south of the border. Part of the power of this film to disturb was the frisson of recognition. Ríos has more on his mind than prematurely misplaced innocence however, as the core scenario sees the ten girls of his ensemble cast locked away in detention, uncertain of which of their number has done the unnamed terrible thing to cause this punishment. As the collective polemic ensues, Ríos flashes us back to prior events in school, and several of the girls recount a more personal story which touch on some of Mexico's more familiar endemic difficulties.

It's a scenario that is perhaps more theatrical than cinematic, though the best of these outgrowths is a delightful animation (another borrowed Asian technique) in which a grandmother is forced to share her home with the family of her hijo patán. Ríos also goes to town a bit with a car crash sequence. The trouble is that on many levels (character, narrative etc.) the whole rather inevitably ends up being less than the sum of its parts. And yet this very unevenness is one of the factors which contributes in the end to maintaining the disguise of the terrible event and the identity of its protagonist.

Over the years I've come to realise that one can almost immediately tell if a movie about Latin America's problems has been made by outsiders or insiders. Sin Nombre and Maria Full of Grace for example, could only have been made by non-indigenous eyes looking in. This kind of ennobled, bleeding heart take on the issues is rarely found in the region's native cinema. Perras is symptomatic of the irreverent local-eye approach we've seen over the years in movies like Matando Cabos, though it lacks the satirical bite of funny yet moving works such as La Nana, Y Tu Mamá Tambien and even El Infierno.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

As ever it's an idiosyncratic, Yankocentric chart. Guzmán Loera comes in seven places ahead of Japan's new PM Yoshihiko Noda. Indeed, Japan's leader is now deemed considerably less weighty in today's world than Brazil's.

Meanwhile, the ECB's 'Super Mario' Draghi matters (just) a bit more than Nicholas Sarkozy, while the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon matters a lot less (at 38) than several US corportate CEOs, though, surprisingly enough, Carlos Slim ("& family") outrank Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who clearly lacks significant relatives. Berlusconi's in, Zapatero isn't. No room either for Papandreou, who matters quite a lot right now and may still do so tomorrow.

And what's with the President of the International Fencing Assocation Alisher Usmanov, at 70?

Does anyone really think that Merkel and Sarko had no idea Papandreou would go rogue (i.e. to the people) after the Brussels get-together last week?

And why is it so surprising, that the nation which invented democracy should think it appropriate that some sort of popular consultation could take place before surrendering much of its sovereign control over its economic fate for the next several years.

Papadreou's gamble does now appear to have backfired, but one can understand the original motivation: transform a Hobson's choice cobbled together by foreign technocrats into something at least resembling a local political Catch-22.

For the Greeks, who might be forgiven for caring less about what now happens to the wider world economy, there's an extended period of economic pain ahead. In the short term at least, the pain would probably be greater if they were permitted the option of disorderly default and a return to the Drachma.

Papandreou may have hoped that his government could play upon popular terror of that greater pain, turning the plebiscite into something of a formality, and covering the collective backsides of Greece's political elite with a democratic mandate for the barber-shop approach to bond-holders.

Or, maybe he wanted to leave the door open for the full meltdown 'solution', which would at least leave the Greeks in charge of their own destiny once again — first in the queue as far as the euro exit sequence goes, and perhaps not that much worse off than everyone else once the impact of this decision has run its course.